The rabbi glanced over glumly from behind the jail bars. 'My faith in God is fine,' he said. 'It's people I'm not so sure about.
And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city's wake.
The conviction that everyone in this house must be dead had gained such a hold on Magnus that it was a shock when the woman who had summoned him here opened the door.
Strange how we decorate pain. These ribbons, for instance, and the small hard teardrops of blood. Who are they for? Do we think the dead care?
She already felt dead in everything but name. What remained to be taken from her? She longed to be enfolded, welcomed, into the earth - to breathe no more, love no more, hurt no more
Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.
I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I'm dead, and then more afterwards.
Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones.
How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.
Lan shook his head sightly "He was better. But he thought I was finished, with only one arm. He never understood. You surrender after you're dead.
What," asked Mr Croup, "do you want?" "What," asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, "does anyone want?" "Dead things," suggested Mr Vandemar. "Extra teeth.
The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The greatest importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls...lies in the discovery of biblical manuscripts dating back to only about 300 years after the close of the Old Testament canon.
She wanted to know if I loved her, so I texted her a picture of a dead bird.
The silence broke:"Sometimes I liked it", I said "Sometimes I liked it that she was dead." "You mean it felt good?" "No. I don't know. It felt ... pure.
Because I think that by beauty, you don't just mean something that's pretty. You mean something that makes us human.
He gets away with it because he's strong.' 'This is the story of mankind.' 'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.' 'Yes. But then I read the newspaper.
I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.
Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.
As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.
...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it...
